Shift Happens

“Maybe I’ll just write about it”. Sarah stared at me blankly (I thought) after I had said this. To this “blankness” I urged “what?” She confidently answered; “you’re growing” and gave me a smile before furiously jotting down notes for her essay due tomorrow, a masterpiece, no doubt.

We are still here in the coffee shoppe; today’s last destination before she drives North to the city we once shared. This morning we had visited an art gallery, paced the festive streets and took pictures of one another jumping in fallen leaves. It’s been ideal, at least for me and I know I will miss her immediately, once she leaves.  There are few people I can sit in front of with whipped cream on my upper lip; she is one of them.

We had first entered the coffee shoppe in our season’s attire; blue jeans and blouses. It’s a Billie Holiday kind-of day.  I think of Chet Baker and New York,  Central Park, crosswalks, and the pace of leaves; the way they mimic the pace of Broadway. If they only knew the streets they could sweep. Billie is never alone, though. I feel B.B King in my boots. Autumn can do that to me. Autumn allows me to feel rhythm and it can become apart of it, too.  All these sounds; the whipping of my hair, the graze of leaves on the street or the quick jingle of a store door- bullied shut by the wind. This season, like poetry, is language embodied. I can’t help but fall in love with it. I am in love.

I hold onto my beret as the wind tries to steal it. Sarah and I take our strides and laugh. BATTLE OF THE ELEMENTS. I try with force to open the door of the coffee shoppe. It’s reluctant of course. I step through the shoppe smiling and looking down at my boots. I can hear jazz as I walk in. I look up and there she is. The person he has loved and whom he vows never to part with in memory. She’s reserved in his heart. She gives me a smile and her name hits me like a sunrise.

We find our seats in the crowded shoppe, I with great difficulty (needless to say). B.B isn’t in my boots anymore.  I tend to spill on myself next to always. This moment will be no exception. And she’ll see it, no doubt. It’s hard to miss a klutz. “Isn’t it hot in here? It’s hot in here, Sarah. Hot. Are you hot?” – I am barely audible. My hands tremble and I flip open my poetry to some anonymous page. I’ve apparently forgotten how to read. I have a kindergarten class to teach in the morning; we’re learning how to read.  So suitable. Sarah interrupts my incompetancy and asks me what kind of tea I would like to drink. I stare at the chalkboard of choices. “Yeah, tea, I’ll have tea…any kind, yeah”. I forgot about tea, too. But it’s out there!

Sarah leaves me to place an order for our tea. I’m bothered; I’m behind in my studying for Poetry and I know I won’t be able to concentrate, either. I just want to go back outside.  What I want is interrupted by my own personal commentary in my head; “I can’t believe you almost asked ‘the smile’ how she was doing. She doesn’t even want to know you. Does she even know who you are in the first place? Yeah, of course. People creep… I creep all the time. Who doesn’t creep? I creep. You’re a ridiculous person, you know that?”

I neglected my personal commentary and gave up on Poetry altogether starting with a thud in closing the damn book of ‘Poetry’. It blew a napkin towards me and I tried to catch it. I missed. “It’s fine”. I tend to say this when I’m in dire need of a change in situation. I’m also fluent in sarcasm.  Humiliated, if not only for my clumsy ways, I was distracted by ’The Smile’s’ laugh. It was actually real nice.  I watched her for a minute as I waited. ‘The Smile’ was diligent, personable and down-right pleasant.  Need I say at this point that I assumed she wasn’t before, having only known her historical alias.  Watching her for a minute, I rationed that I was “star struck”. My mom and I thought we saw Dennis Quaid in Hawaii once.  This was even worse. Imagine that- Dennis Quaid. Yeah, it was actually heavier than that and this “smile” doesn’t act; not even a nominee. 

Though she has no “star” status, I knew her in pictures well and I had grown accustomed to hearing about this particular person. Like some sort of celebrity I was in awe of the reality that she existed beyond photo paper and telephone wire; “wait, you’re real?”

She WAS real! Very. It finally happened. Maybe she knew enough about me to know that there would be a day I’d slip into her shoppe to write.  Maybe I was giving the whole scenario too much thought. But I am a woman, and I know women. I don’t doubt it, really. This ‘Smile’ and I don’t know one another exclusively but I am, or was, indirectly, or perhaps directly, apart of one the most difficult experiences she has come to live through thus far in her life. Having been told that this person resented me (without knowing me), then, or now, the battles lines were clearly drawn.

But she smiled at me today and the axis on my world went wonky. Genuine or not, she had smiled at me and I realized while waiting for my tea to steep that it wasn’t an easy thing for her to do. Watching her work, I liked her immediately and I tried a different perspective; an objective one, if such an objective can exist with people.

I misjudged someone I didn’t even know. I had reckoned this much by the time that tea was cool enough to drink. How does that happen, the misjudgement, I mean? How does it happen? I felt her watch me as I thought and looked into my big blue cup. We had more than inevitable tension in common and I felt a release, for the first time. I liked her necklace and the way she said “how’s it going?” to approaching coffee-goers. “She’s lovely” I thought. I told Sarah, too.  I took a break in thought (as if) and went to the ladies room. I checked myself out. It’s true. Whatever. I don’t regret anything about myself but she inspired me, this person, perhaps out of self consciousness, to look into the mirror.  When I am under the influence of a sharp bottle of wine I tell myself that I am “under the influence” while looking into the mirror. It’s a quirk. Some people find it funny ( probably on account that they do the same (ie. “I’m so drunk right now”). I didn’t have wine in my tea cup but I felt drunk enough. Breathing in deeply and my hands propping me up by the sink I looked at my  reflection and said, for the love of god, “you’re so drunk right now”.  Reality did it to me.  I was intoxicated by reality and consumed by what I didn’t know and thought I did (like most drunks). I caught  sight of the chalkboard opposite the mirror. These damn chalkboards were everywhere.  I felt like going Jackson Pollock on them. There were quotes written on this chalkboard, probably written and decorated by the people who worked in the shoppe.  Two of them were:

“Let your heart live” and “Don’t cry because it’s over, rejoice that it happened”.

This person, The Smile, could have written these and I’d know why. I was enlightened by her smile and the quotes conveyed in front of me,  regardless if the smile was false and the quotes written by some milk boy with freakishly nice printing and overwhelming sentimentality.  Enlightenment, nonetheless. I took my seat after my “break” and reckoned why he had fallen in love with her. It was life all over again. It was meaningful and I understood and respected this meaning.  I admired her and I admired him. I admired her for smiling at me and I admired him for knowing that she would.  I shouldn’t have assumed otherwise but I had and reckoned that I was wrong.

Despite where my story goes, the one she knows of, I am so grateful to that smile and always will be. I’ll finish my tea and be done; face the leaves and the chime of the streets knowing the people that walk them have stories of their own that come and go. The streets are full of heartbreak and cupids. I’ll walk them knowing this much.  We pace as the people we are destined to be.  For however long she decides to recite the week’s “daily specials” I hope while gazing out that shoppe window someone catches her eye and that Autumn no longer leaves fog inside the glass of her summer heart.  I hope, however ironic, perhaps humorous, that she will consider me to be her so-called “daily special”. She reminds me, perhaps unintentionally,  that we are threatening to ourselves when we stray from who we truly are on account of feelings or events that are overwhelming in their reality; jealousy for one.  Life will go on. You can either appreciate something or someone or be consumed by the inverse of appreciation. It cannot be forced, either.  You learn nothing without genuine compassion. If you cannot adapt to understanding or inherit it from experience, you cannot grow as a person. You cannot be enriched.

“Maybe I’ll just write about it”

…

“What?”

Sarah says “you’re growing”.

And that’s today’s special. Shift happens.